Founder and Editor of The Lanchester Review. Previous or occasional contributor to Telegraph Blogs, Comment is Free, The First Post/The Week, Harry's Place, New Directions, The Brussels Journal, The London Progressive Journal, Labour Uncut, The American Conservative and Russia Today (RT). Available for work via davidaslindsay@hotmail.com, all lower case.

Saturday, 27 September 2008

Answer

If you do not want Sharia Law here, then you must oppose usury. Either or both of staying Catholic and reading the Bible would have created a situation in which, among much other avoided misery, nobody would have felt the need to look to Sharia for moral, humane alternatives to the existing financial system.

The Western answer to Islam is not capitalism and the secularism from which it is as inseparable as Marxism is, however much many capitalists or some Marxists might wish it otherwise. The Western answer to Islam is Christianity, the age-old enemy of usury.

4 comments:

Pity more so-called Christians don't take heed of the words and deeds of Christ... At the same time as the shadow home secretary is saying we should be proud of our christian heritage, David Cameron refuses to condemn speculators and greed in the City like Anglican leaders Archbishops Williams and Sentamu.

Whether you can be a proper Sunni or a proper Shi'ite while being a Sufi is a moot point among Sunnis and Shi'ites respectively. But Sufis themselves are in no doubt: you have to be either a Sunni or a Sh'ite to belong to a given Sufi tradition - sometimes either, sometimes one or the other.

Those seeking to create a Caliphate where Russia currently is in the North Caucasus are Sufi Muslims, and they murder a great many public officials and ethnic Russians.

The fantasy of Sufi placidity bordering on pacifism, wholly incompatible with anything like Wahhabism or Deobandism, is not true in the Caucasus (Ingushetia, neighbouring and closely connected Chechnya, and elsewhere), not true in the Balkans (where they rallied to the likes of Izetbegovic and the Kosovo "Liberation" Army), not true in Libya (where at least one third of the population adheres to the Sanusi synthesis of Wahhabism and popular Sufism), spectacularly not true in the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora, not true all round.

About Me

Founder, Proprietor, Publisher and Editor of The Lanchester Review since 2013. Founder, Proprietor (for now), Publisher (for now) and Editor-in-Chief of Lanchester Books since 2014. Charity volunteer and administrator since 1994. Freelance journalist since 1996. Supply teacher and market research worker from 2002 until prevented by disability. Member of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham since 2006. Preventing the University of Durham’s undergraduates’ degrees from getting the way of their education since 2000.
Elected Parish Councillor from the age of 21 until I stood down voluntarily in 2013. During that time, Lanchester was among the first in the country to secure power of wellbeing, power of general competence, and Quality Parish Council Status.
At 21, I began eight years as a governor of a primary school which, at the time of my appointment, still had the same Headteacher as when I had been a pupil there. Three weeks short of 22, I found myself in the same position when I began eight years as a governor of a comprehensive school.
Since May 2013, a member of the Community Panel advising Durham’s Police and Crime Commissioner.